The Roaring Twenties: Flappers and the 'New Woman'

• The Roaring Twenties was a period of American history of dramatic change.
• More Americans lived in cities than on farms for the first time ever.
• The nation's wealth more than doubled from 1920 to 1929.
• GNP (gross national product) expanded by 40 percent from 1922–1929.
• Americans bought the same goods, listened to the same music and did the same dances.
• The excesses of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down when the economy tanked.

Flappers and the 'New Woman'

• The flapper is a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank and smoked.
• They said “unladylike” things and were more “free” than previous generations.
• Though most young women in the 1920s didn't behave like flappers they adopted the fashion.
• The 19th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote in 1920.
• Millions of women worked in blue and white-collar jobs.
• They could afford to participate in the consumer economy.
• Increased availability of birth control devices allowed women to have fewer children.
• 16 percent of American households had electricity in 1912.
• More than 60 percent had electricity by the mid-1920s.
• New machines like the washing machine, freezer, and vacuum cleaner reduced household work.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

• Americans spent extra money on movies, fashion and consumer goods like refrigerators.
• They bought radios.
• The first commercial radio station, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920.
• Warren G Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio two years later.
• By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.
• Three quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week.
• Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.
• The Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924
• Generous credit made automobiles affordable
• By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans.
• Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs and the oil industry expanded

The Jazz Age

• Cars gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased.
• The Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.
• Jazz bands played at venues in New York City and Chicago.
• Radio stations and phonograph records carried tunes to listeners across the nation: 100 million phonograph records were sold in 1927.
• Some older people objected to jazz music describing it as "vulgarity" and "depravity”.
• Many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.
• F Scott Fitzgerald said that the 1920s were “the most expensive orgy in history”.
• Other artists ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition

• The 18th Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned the manufacture and sale of liquors.
• The Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon at 12 a.m. Jan 16, 1920.
• It was illegal to sell any intoxication beverages with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.
• The liquor trade went underground and people went to speakeasies.
• Al Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.
• Prohibition was a way for middle-class white Americans to control immigrant masses. Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city.

Immigration and Racism

• An anti-Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged widespread anti-immigrant hysteria.
• The National Origins Act of 1924 set immigration quotas excluding some people
• The law favored Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain.
• Immigrants and Black Americans were targets.
• The Great Migration of Black Americans to Northern cities and the Harlem Renaissance discomfited some white Americans.
• The KKK had two million members by the middle of the decade.
• They believed the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced Roaring Twenties were trampling. The 1920s threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

• Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation.
• Many found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries.
• A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925.
• It drew attention to discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions.
• Housing demands and discriminatory housing practices led to a rise of urban ghettos.
• The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election and white mob violence.
• The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching law, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922.
• Oscar De Priest became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.
• The Roaring Twenties ushered in a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, “New Women” and advocates of old-fashioned family values.
• The Roaring Twenties gave many middle-class Americans unprecedented freedom and upward economic mobility.